Philosophy and the Joyful Life

Category Archives: Religion Essays

This month we saw a Democratic President of the United States seek an audience with the Pope, likely with the hopes he could regain his tarnished progressive image by having some of the Bishop of Rome’s credentials rub off on him. And if nothing else, this unusual state of affairs goes to show that the music of Prince, who, two decades ago sang “You can be the president, I’d rather be the Pope” is as relevant as ever.i

By last month Pope Francis, or Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was a year in to his tenure as leader of the oldest and largest religious organisation on the planet. Bergoglio, formerly the archbishop of Buenos Aires, had taken charge of a church whose members believe him to be the final authority on all holy matters. And judging by recent media reaction it seems that some in the secular world are beginning to think the same. Read the rest of this entry →

Excellent satire of the prevalent idea I criticised before that the Bible prohibits homosexuality. Click through the link to read the whole article. Somewhere there’s one like this on women priests, I’ll try to dig out the link to that too.

As a baptized, ordained, practicing, Bible-reading, Spirit-filled, Jesus-loving Christian, I just have to say how sick and tired I am of these straight-marriage activists spreading their heterosexual agenda all over my church and country!

Their sinful, detestable practices are unbiblical and unnatural in the eyes of science and God. It may not be “politically correct” to say so these days, but I refuse to “tolerate” these perverts and their lies anymore…

Don’t take my word for it, here is what the BIBLE says:

Genesis 4

After God made Adam and Eve, they had three sons: Cain, Abel, and Seth. No daughters. Yet is specifically says that Cain got married to a woman. Did you…

In the UK at least, the question of whether the law should call civil partnerships marriages is a merely semantic dispute. It is not about equality, under the existing legislation in Britain same-sex couples already have that, and it’s not about homophobia either. It is that the term ‘marriage’, by contrast to near synonyms ‘wedding’ and perhaps ‘union’, requires two heterogeneous elements mixed to create something new. To make a crude example, some salad can go together to make a nice salad, but fried chicken and piri piri sauce- that’s a marriage. But of course it goes deeper than that. It is also about mystery, and here the mystery is the unknown nature -yet wondrous complementarity- of the other (in both mind and body).

The semantic dispute doesn’t only come down to whether or not the ceremonies take place in the context of a belief system, but also to the content of a belief. Surprisingly, many people disagree with gay marriage even though they don’t believe that homosexuality is condemned by god.

In our cultural heritage, marriage has always been the Christian sacrament of holy matrimony, a ritual practise which symbolises not just a committed romantic relationship between two people, but the union of two people into one biological whole from which new life (literally) flows as a transformation of their love. Read the rest of this entry →

Sikhism and Jainism are two smaller but significant Indic religions, which like Buddhism split off from Hinduism. In addition to their shared cultural origins (including belief in the Karma, Rebirth, and Liberation of the soul) they also both put a particularly strong emphasis on universal love. In what follows I will summarise the most interesting things I’ve learned about Sikhism. Read the rest of this entry →

Traditional display for Diwali, ‘the festival of light’ celebrated in all Indic religions.

Jainism and Sikhism are two smaller but significant Indic religions, which like Buddhism split off from Hinduism. In addition to their shared cultural origins (including belief in the Karma, Rebirth, and Liberation of the soul) they also both put a particularly strong emphasis on universal love. In this post I have a look at Jainism.[1] Read the rest of this entry →

Plato (423 – 347 BC) provides several arguments for his claim that the soul is immortal, and for various reasons none of these are convincing. Their fundamental flaw is that the existence of a kind of soul to which the arguments apply is presupposed. Most of the arguments are found in his Socratic dialogue Phaedo (of which the Recollection Argument is also found in the Meno, but I do not cover that version here) and a further important one is found in the last book of The Republic (another Socratic dialogue). Read the rest of this entry →